Two neuropsychological hypotheses concerning perceptual, cognitive and motivational changes in chronic alcoholics have been formulated: Chronic alcohol ingestion results in patterns of perceptual-cognitive-behavior similar to a) patients with known frontal lobe damage and b) patients with right hemisphere lesions. Tests of these hypotheses will be made on groups of long and short term (duration of heavy drinking) alcoholics and on younger and older alcoholics. Alcoholics will be carefully screened to eliminate other possible causes of deficit performance, e.g. liver disease, head injury, poor nutrition, other diseases, etc. Evidence to date suggests that "dried out" long term alcoholics differ from short term alcoholics on certain abstracting tests but do not differ on perceptual discrimination, visual search, reaction time and simple memory tasks. However, age of alcoholics also is an important variable. In three separate studies we have found that age is inversely correlated with quality of abstracting behavior and visual search performance in alcoholics but not in control subjects. More complex tasks involving a) abstracting behavior as a function of aging, b) memory for temporal ordering of verbal and non-verbal stimuli and c) visual and tactual spatial motor performance are to be administered to samples of long term and short term, older and younger alcoholics and controls. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: Jones, B.M., Parsons, O.A. & Rundell, O.H. Psychophysiological correlates of alcoholism. In Tarter, R. & Sugerman, A. (Eds.), Alcoholism: Interdisciplinary approaches to an enduring problem. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. June, 1976, pp. 435-477. Prigatano, G.P. & Parsons, O.A. The relationship of age and education to Halstead Test performance in different patient populations. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1976, 44, 527-533.